A lot of pkg problems

Warren Block wblock at wonkity.com
Tue Sep 16 21:16:26 UTC 2014


On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:

> I have posted a fair amount of questions/issues w/ pkg as well. I think most 
> of the problems are with documentation. The interactions between ports & pkgs 
> as managed by pkg are not necessarily intuitive, & *ALL* documentation (man 
> pages, 'pkg help ....', & online docs) are mum on that matter. There are some 
> files/metadata/etc. that apparently are used by both packages (ports & pkg), 
> & it is maddeningly easy to run afoul of those interactions, at least for me. 
> I have boiled it down to 'always do whatever you are going to do w/ pkg 
> *1st*, then mess w/ ports' .... That is working for me, but my setup is 
> pretty simplistic .... YMMV, IANAL, & all that rot ....

There is a simple misunderstanding here.  A package is just the binary 
version of a port.  When a port is compiled and installed, it is really 
creating a package and installing that.

pkg is a tracking system.  The packages can be built from ports or 
downloaded as pre-built packages.  Mixing both is not generally 
recommended.

The amount of time people are willing to invest in "saving time" with 
packages is interesting.  In many cases, they could have built from 
ports and been done quicker overall, or at least with less user 
involvement.


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